Page 33 of Don't Hate the Player
“Sweet summer child. You can’t turn down food in this house,” she explains.
I take Matt’s phone from Penny’s hands and haul myself off the bed to hand it back to him. “Just eat and don’t say anything about anything.”
Halfway to the door, Penny taps my arm and waves Matt on to go downstairs. “I need to talk to Lia for a second,” she says. Matt eyes both of us, Penny smiling and me looking gently terrified, and takes the out he is given. Once we hear my parents greet him in the kitchen, Penny pushes the door to my bedroom closed with the tip of her finger.
“I’m still mad,” she says. “When you asked me to cover for you, I thought you wanted to hang out with Connor or do something, I don’t know, normal?”
“Penny, I—”
She grabs a pen from my desk and holds it up. “I have the talking stick. This tournament is a big deal for you. I get that. I mean, the money alone is huge, but there are going to be weekends where I need my VP available for real campaign meetings. And after-school stuff too. How often do you practice with your team . . . Angry?” She hands me the pen.
“Fury. Every night, pretty much. Even after field hockey I’m up till midnight or sometimes later.” I don’t have much else to say beyond that, so I pass the pen back.
“That’s not going to work,” she sighs. “I’m dropping you from the ticket.”
I try to yank the pen back to respond, but Penny holds it tight. Can she just let me explain?
“No, nuh-uh. You don’t hide a huge part of your life from your best friend unless it’s something really important, butcome on. You signed up for this tournament knowing you’d be half-assing my campaign. What am I supposed to do with that?”
I’ve been so focused on getting Penny to seem less angry that I wasn’t really paying attention to her feelings until now. She’s not mad, I don’t think, but she’s hurt. If I were her, I’d be hurt too. I’ve blown her off so many times forGLO-related stuff, and she’s smart enough to put those skipped diner nights and sorry-I-can’t-sleepovers together now that she knows the whole story.
“I . . .” I look at the pen in Penny’s hands. She places it slowly back on my desk. “I wanted to be a good candidate, you know.”
“You’re the perfect candidate, actually. Well, you were.” She punctuates that with a sarcastic toss of her braids. “I thought you were, at least.”
“Will you let me fix it?” There has to be something I can do. I can draw up a list, convince anyone to be on her ticket, do cartwheels in the cafeteria on election day, anything to help get Penny out of the mess I put her in.
“Let you? You’re gonna fix it,” Penny replies. “And if you pull this off, I’ll do you one better.”
Pull what off? What am I pulling off?
“I want Connor on my ticket,” she says simply. “He can get me the soccer team, and, like, half the school is in love with him, so that will make up for losing the athlete loyalty I’d earn with you.”
“You want to run with Connor?” I mean, cool strategy, but that’s a way bigger get for Penny than asking me, her . . . ? objectively shitty best friend. I’m going to have to work this out for her. It’s the least I can do.
“Yup. He was my second choice, and you’re going to convince him for me. While you do that, I’ll cover for you with your parents on tournament days. If you lose . . . ?we’ll explain that you dropped out to focus on Model UN or something.”
“And if I win?”
Penny wraps me in a hug. Wait, I thought she was mad at me. Is Penny inventing a new, angry hug? “If you win, you’ll have new problems and even God can’t save you.” Well when you put it that way, damn. “This whole thing is just so you.”
“You think so?” I gasp when she releases me.
“I mean, yeah. Only you would be Olympic-level good at something and never tell anyone about it. You’re, like, obsessed with making everything so much harder than it needs to be. I’m your friend, Lia! It really sucks that you didn’t trust me. I don’t know. It hurts that I had to find out through Matt.”
I think back to Matt deleting the screenshots without me asking and letting Penny use his phone mid-warpath. “He’s actually not that bad.”
“Right? Go figure. He might make a half-decent campaign manager for real.” She opens the door to start going downstairs. “Imma go hire him.”
“Wait!” I say. I kneel down and close my PC’s false cabinet. Penny watches me line up the hinges and shakes her head in disbelief.
“Florence,” she mutters, “my god.”
I’m impressed with how much restraint my parents have shown with lunch knowing we have guests over. Penny’s here all the time, but Matt is New People, so I thought there’d be a spread of enormous proportions—instead it is merely massive. My dad grilled some chicken and chopped it up for salad in a bowl big enough to bathe a spaniel, and Mom threw together a cheese board that takes up half of our kitchen island. When the two of us get to the kitchen, Matt is thoroughly entranced by my dad, who is using a pair of chopsticks to flip thin medallions of plantain in a pan of bubbling oil.
“Yo, Lia, can I come here for lunch all the time?” Matt asks. “The plantain chips in the vending machine at school suck compared to these.”
“It’s all in the timing, young Padawan,” my dad explains. “Here, that one’s almost ready to flip.” He hands the chopsticks to Matt, who holds them like Obi-Wan just trusted him with a lightsaber.
